Rosemont Complex Work Set

Work will begin this month on one of the largest commercial projects to date this year in the northwest suburbs--a $150 million, office-hotel complex in Rosemont to be called River Way.

Hawthorn Realty Group, Chicago, and Melvin Simon & Associates Inc., Indianapolis, will build River Way on 28 acres east of Des Plaines River Road between Higgins Road (Ill. Hwy. 72) and the Northwest Tollway (Int. Hwy. 90). The site is currently occupied by a 50,000-square-foot plant and warehouse of Dearborn Wire & Cable Co., according to a spokesman for Hawthorn.

Hawthorn and Simon will raze the old Dearborn Wire plant this month. Construction will begin by year`s end and wrap up in the spring of 1987 of a luxury hotel and two 12-story office buildings totaling 500,000 square feet.

Offices will have annual rents of $21 to $22 a square foot. Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estate Services will be the leasing agent.

A hotel company will lease land from the River Way partnership to build, own and operate an upscale, all-suite lodging facility up to 10 stories tall and with 350 to 400 suites, according to Barry Lindsey, vice president of development for Simon.

Lindsey declined to identify prospective hotel operators with whom negotiations are being held but said the developers expect to select one within 45 days.

Two more office structures totaling another 500,000 square feet are likely to be started in 1987, Lindsey said. When completed in 1988, River Way will have up to 80,000 square feet of restaurants and retailers on the first two levels of all of its office buildings.

Plans drawn by the St. Louis architectural firm of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum also call for a series of surface parking lots on the perimeter;

two 4-level, 1,500-car parking decks and a 3-story, 90,000-square-foot concourse that will connect the office buildings and the hotel.

The concourse will house additional restaurants and retail shops, a health club with swimming pool and exercise facilities and an auditorium. At the center of the project will be a landscaped courtyard incorporating a stream that runs through the site.

Simon, a company best known as national developer of shopping centers, acquired the Dearborn Wire site in 1979 for a regional mall with up to 900,000 square feet. The recession put an end to that plan, and two years ago Simon began negotiations with Hawthorn over selling its land. The talks instead led to a joint venture development agreement.

Simon also became Hawthorn`s partner at O`Hare International Center, an $85 million project with two, 250,000-square-foot office buildings and a 300- unit Embassy Suites hotel on the southeast corner of Mannheim and Higgins Roads, Rosemont.

Construction began earlier this year. The first office building there is scheduled to open early next year, and the hotel, next summer. The second office structure is expected to open in 1987.

In the last year Simon has developed nearly 900,000 square feet of community shopping centers in Burbank, Elgin and Waukegan, and plans to construct an additional 1.3 million square feet of community centers in Bloomingdale, Joliet, Matteson, Orland Park and Rockford in the coming year.

The company has approximately 8 million square feet of retailing space under construction or about to be started across the nation and expects to complete more than 42 million square feet over the next five years--as much space as it has done in the last 25 years.

It recently opened St. Louis Centre, a downtown mall containing 1.4 million square feet of retailing, and is developing regional shopping centers in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, Tulsa and Washington, D.C.

Site preparation began earlier this year for Simon`s largest project to date, Newport City in Jersey City, N.J. The development, a joint venture with the LeFrak Organization of New York and Glimcher Co. of Columbus, Ohio, will have more than 1 million square feet of retailing, 4 million square feet of offices, 9,000 apartments and 1,200 luxury hotel rooms.